The Great Migration in African American Art

Great Migration art is the body of work African American artists made to document the movement of about six million Black Americans out of the South between 1910 and 1970, with Jacob Lawrence's 60-panel Migration Series as its defining work.

That number comes from the National Archives research guide on the Great Migration, which describes the movement in two waves. Roughly two million people left the South between the world wars. Another three million left in the twenty years after World War II, heading not just to New York, Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh but west to Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle. It was one of the largest internal population shifts in American history, and it happened almost entirely without a photographer from a national magazine standing at the train station. The people who recorded it best were painters, printmakers and collagists, most of them either migrants themselves or the children of migrants.

What is the most famous work of Great Migration art?

Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, painted in 1940 and 1941. Sixty small panels, casein tempera on hardboard primed with gesso, each one 12 by 18 inches. Every panel carries a caption. Panel one reads, "During World War I there was a great migration north by southern African Americans."

Lawrence was 23 when he finished it. He'd received a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund in 1940, which paid for a studio on West 125th Street big enough to lay out all sixty panels at the same time. That detail matters more than it sounds. He mixed one color and carried it across every panel that needed it before mixing the next, which is why the series reads as a single visual argument rather than sixty separate pictures. The same flat red keeps reappearing. The same mustard yellow. The figures are simplified almost to silhouettes, often faceless, and the compositions are built from hard diagonals that push the eye in one direction, north.

He originally called it The Migration of the Negro. In 1993, Lawrence himself retitled it The Migration Series and rewrote most of the captions, since the older language had fallen out of use. Both titles refer to the same work. If you see the older one in a book from the 1970s, that's not an error, just an earlier edition.

The series moved fast. All sixty panels showed at Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery in Manhattan in 1941, and twenty-six of them ran in the November 1941 issue of Fortune magazine. It's widely cited as the first substantial feature a mainstream American magazine gave to the work of a Black artist. Lawrence went from unknown to nationally reviewed inside a single year. We've written more about how the panels function as a sequence in our full breakdown of the Migration Series.

Why is Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series split between two museums?

Because two institutions wanted it at the same time and neither would back down.

In 1942, the year after the Downtown Gallery show, both the Museum of Modern Art and The Phillips Collection in Washington moved to buy the series. Alfred H. Barr Jr. at MoMA and Duncan Phillips at the Phillips worked out a compromise that sounds like something from a folk tale. They cut the deck. The Phillips Collection took the thirty odd-numbered panels. MoMA took the thirty even-numbered ones. Mrs. David M. Levy funded MoMA's half.

So the work has been legally and physically divided for more than eighty years. Panel 1 is in Washington. Panel 2 is in New York. Panel 3 is in Washington. It goes on like that for all sixty.

The two museums do reunite it, but rarely. MoMA's 2015 exhibition One-Way Ticket brought all sixty panels back together in New York for the first time in twenty years, alongside work by other artists, photographers and writers who covered the same years. Short of an exhibition like that, the closest thing to seeing the sequence whole is the Phillips Collection project site that presents all sixty panels in order. If you've only ever seen the panels in a book, seeing thirty of them on one wall is a different experience. The rhythm of the repeated colors only really lands at scale.

There's a quiet irony in the arrangement that's hard to miss. A work about people being separated from home ended up permanently separated from itself.

How did other artists record the Great Migration?

Lawrence wasn't working alone, and he wasn't first.

Aaron Douglas got there in 1934 with Aspects of Negro Life, a four-panel mural cycle painted for the branch library on 135th Street in Harlem, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The four panels are The Negro in an African Setting, An Idyll of the Deep South, From Slavery Through Reconstruction, and Song of the Towers. Read together they trace a route from West Africa through enslavement and Reconstruction into the Jim Crow South and then north into Harlem itself. Douglas built the whole cycle out of flat silhouettes and concentric rings of light. It's history painting that refuses to look like European history painting. Our piece on Aaron Douglas and the visual language he invented goes deeper into how those forms work.

Archibald Motley painted the destination rather than the journey. His Chicago scenes show the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side, and specifically the commercial strip known as the Stroll, packed with people at night under artificial light. Black Belt, from 1934, is at the Hampton University Museum. The Whitney acquired Gettin' Religion, painted in 1948, back in 2016, and it was the first Motley to enter that collection. What Motley documented was what happened after arrival: a segregated district turned into a functioning city within a city, with its own clubs, businesses, churches and street life. We've written separately about Motley's nightlife paintings and what they actually depict.

Romare Bearden approached it from memory. He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1911, and his family moved to Harlem while he was still small. Decades later, working in collage, he kept returning to rural Mecklenburg County: trains, porches, guitars, the specific geography of a childhood he left before he could have chosen to. That's a common structure in this work. The South doesn't disappear from the art when the artist leaves it. It gets carried.

Why does Great Migration art still matter to people buying art now?

Because for a lot of American families it isn't history. It's a household story that happened two or three generations back, and most people know some version of it. A grandmother who came up from Mississippi to Chicago. A great-uncle who took the train from Alabama to Detroit for factory work. A family that landed in Oakland in 1948 and never went back.

That's why work in this tradition hangs so differently from generic decor. A painting of a train platform, a suitcase, a Southern porch or a city block at night isn't just composition on a wall. For the right household it's a direct reference to a real journey. Art that carries that weight tends to stay up for decades rather than getting swapped out when the sofa changes.

If you're building a wall around that idea, contemporary work matters as much as the historical canon. Original pieces printed on archival canvas, from a train platform at dusk to African American ballerina wall art, let you live with imagery in this lineage at a size that actually holds a room, without pretending you own a museum panel. Noirci Studio prints to order in the USA and pays the artist a royalty on every sale, which is a different arrangement from the mass-produced overseas print market and a very different one from AI-generated imagery, which we don't sell and won't.

What should you look for when collecting art about the Great Migration?

A few practical filters.

Know what you're actually buying. Lawrence's panels are in museums and are not for sale. Anything sold as a Migration Series "print" is a reproduction, and reputable sellers say so plainly on the listing. If a seller is vague about whether a piece is an original, an authorized reproduction or a poster, that vagueness is the answer.

Look for specific place, not generic nostalgia. The strongest work in this tradition names something. Bearden's Mecklenburg County. Motley's Stroll. Lawrence's train stations and station platforms with their numbered destination boards. Work that gestures at "the South" without any particular South in it usually reads thin on a wall after a few months.

Check whether the artist is paid. A lot of imagery in this category circulates with no living artist attached to it and no royalty flowing anywhere. If the work is contemporary, find out who made it and whether they earn from the sale. That's a straightforward question and a good seller answers it directly.

Watch for AI slop. Search results for this subject are now full of generated images that borrow the flat shapes and warm palettes of the period without any of the source. They tend to fall apart in the hands and faces, and they cite nothing. This work exists because real people documented something they lived through. Buying a synthetic imitation of it inverts the entire point.

Lawrence sat in the Schomburg reading about the migration before he mixed a single color. That's the standard the tradition sets. Whatever you hang, hang something that came from somewhere.

Sources

• National Archives, "The Great Migration (1910-1970)," African American Heritage research guide
• The Museum of Modern Art, "One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North" (2015 exhibition) and the Migration Series panels in the museum collection
• The Phillips Collection, "Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series," project site presenting all sixty panels
• The New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life murals (1934), Art and Artifacts Division